As computers and networks gain popularity, web-based computer documents (“documents”) become a vast source of factual information. Users may look to these documents to get answers to factual questions, such as “what is the capital of Poland” or “what is the birth date of George Washington.” The factual information included in these documents may be extracted and stored in a fact database.
When extracting facts from documents, facts related to an entity can be organized together in an object representing the entity in a repository. The object can use an object name to identify the represented entity. The object name can be a name of the represented entity. People often use different names (hereinafter called “synonymous names”) to refer to the same entity. For example, when a person speaks about “IBM” or “Big Blue,” the audience understands that the speaker is referring to the International Business Machines Corporation.
When searching for answers to factual questions in objects, it is useful to know the synonymous names of the relevant entities. Users may conduct a search for a question about an entity using one of its synonymous names (e.g., “IBM”). Objects containing answers to the question may use a different synonymous name (e.g., “International Business Machines Corporation”) to identify the same entity. Because the name used in the objects may not match with the name used in the search, users may end up not finding the answers.
One conventional approach to determining synonymous names of an object (the synonymous names of the entity represented by the object) is to consult people familiar with the entity represented by the object. This approach is insufficient because the vast and rapidly increasing number of objects in the repository makes it impractical for any human to perform the task on any meaningful scale. This conventional approach is also expensive and vulnerable to human errors.
For these reasons, what is needed is a way to determine synonymous names of an object that does not suffer from the drawbacks described above.